


Pidgin

by archwrites (Arch)



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:02:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arch/pseuds/archwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for LJ's adelrya, who asked for "Harry/Luna after the war, where Harry was able to defeat Voldemort but many people were killed."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pidgin

Luna sat back on her heels, grief and nostalgia and a sort of wonder pulling viscerally at her stomach. In her hand was a simple piece of parchment with some notes from Defense Against the Dark Arts, 1995 -- Harry's old _Quibbler_ interview, Transfigured and stashed away in her trunk for the past eleven years. Even at fourteen, she really had been brilliant at spell-work, she realized, for that glamour to have lasted so long.

She touched the parchment gently, her hands shaking, and looked out the window to the garden, which Harry was weeding ferociously. It had been a bad morning, fighting over breakfast, Harry accusatory and Luna pale and withdrawn. Anniversaries were always like this; their year was a cycle of mourning, and Muggle poets notwithstanding, June was by far the cruellest month. Year after year, Harry and Luna stumbled through the anniversaries of Sirius' death, of Dumbledore's death, of the horrific day when Fred, George, and Ginny were all killed, and hardest of all, the anniversary of Ron and Hermione's deaths, the same day when the rest of the wizarding world was celebrating Voldemort's fall.

Today.

Luna pulled her wand from behind her ear and tapped the parchment. Her slanting writing rearranged itself on the page, transforming into neat if emphatic lines of text, winding around a startling picture of fifteen-year-old Harry looking defiant and hopeful and so very young. She stared for a very long time, watching that Harry blink and shift and, every now and then, grin at someone to the left of the frame. That was why she kept watching: for the record of that swift boyish smile, the key signifier that would allow her to decode one half of the secret language of looks and smirks that used to pass between Harry and the ones he loved. She had always been good at decoding things, always willing to puzzle out the abstract. But this was a language that remained ineffable to her, just as her talk of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks had bemused Hermione. Luna knew that she and Harry had their own patois of looks and gestures, habits and rituals, that had soothed them in the immediate aftermath of the war. But their language was pidgin compared with the intricacies of the Harry-Ron-Hermione language, which not even Ginny had fully mastered before she died.

The old-fashioned clock in the sitting room struck five. Putting down the article, Luna moved over to the open window. "Harry!" she called. "If we're going to replace all the flowers, we'll need to leave soon."

Harry looked up at her, his expression blank. "All right," he replied, dusting off his hands. "I'm coming."

Luna tried to smile encouragingly at him, but she could feel its meaning faltering and failing and didn't know how to fix it. The language of the Potters' marriage remained stilted, a broken grammar for a shattered innocence.  



End file.
